A series of disconnected events can be used to identify a threat. Imagine your system alerting you that one of your endpoints has received a suspicious file. You have a sophisticated IPS that is capable of informing you that the file came from a suspicious site. The latter event is not enough to convict the file – therefore it generates a low priority alert that gets lost in the flood of other alerts... The infected endpoint connects to several popular news sites and downloads their front page. This will not generate any alerts; but a good network behavioral analysis engine, which is part of a “next generation” IPS solution, would log the activity. Your analysts have plenty to do, so this is clearly not going to get their attention. What has really happened is that the infected endpoint just confirmed network connectivity. After several hours, your alert screen, having wrapped a few hundreds of times since the infection, now reports another low priority alert, but on its own is not sufficient to convict the endpoint as compromised. The infected endpoint (bot) is now trying to locate other bots by looking up randomly generated URIs based on dynamic DNS domains. Of course, your IPS cannot know these are randomly generated URIs, but sees a number of failed DNS queries followed by one successful one. The newly infected bot then connects to another bot downloading its payload with no traffic traversing the IPS since it is not communicating outside. Does this sound far-fetched and unlikely, like an extreme example? Well, this is how Kraken works, and the Kraken botnet has been active since at least 2008.

This won't affect Intel alone. I would expect others to take similar measures, and if not, would wonder why. This seems to be an important consideration for operations in that geograhic region, and soon enogh, everywhere.

JPMorgan's Chief Investment Office was given an edict to try to reduce risk-weighted assets, as part of a firm-wide initiative in the face of regulatory changes...

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

The default of Kodak in January 2012 was a credit event that would certainly have influenced JP Morgan's CIO's decisions leading up to the "London Whale" in May 2012. Eastman Kodak was part of many credit default swap indices. Kodak's filing for bankruptcy on January 19th led to a variety of idiosyncratic risk exposures in JPM's synthetic credit portfolio.

Very noisy! "We study the term structure of disagreement of professional forecasters for key macroeconomic variables."

Conclusion - There is great uncertainty about the short term AND long run, even by those who should know. Downward sloping GDP, in the U.S.A. and globally, is conceivable, rather than an extremely low likelihood catastrophic scenario.

Much fanfare accompanied the Sept. 25, 2010, launch of the Air Force’s Space Based Space Surveillance satellite.

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

It immediately went offline (though fixed, finally, in August 2012). The malfunction was due to a high-energy, ionizing radiation cloud, identified in 1958 by James Van Allen, when Sputnik I's instruments were also affected. He believed the cause to be anomalous radiation, which led to his discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts. The innermost belt dips closest to Earth above an area 300 km east of Brazil, at 200 km altitude, because the Earth's magnetic field is weakest there. On 8 Mar 2012, the Earth's upper atmosphere experienced the disruptive effects of solar flares. 2013 is the apex of that 11-year solar cycle, Once it has past, we'll only have the more predictable though not well-understood effects of the South Atlantic Anomaly to contend with.

The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC) is a new resource for identifying, then analyzing conflict, insurgency or civil war data. It should be helpful for geopolitical risk assessment including changing trends in global political violence.

Gary King, PhD has a nice collection of outlier event-themed research work, covering a wide range of fields of study. I think the website uses Harvard's OpenScholar CMS, which is an additional feature worth noting.

* The image that accompanies this was my choice (Prof. King has nothing to do with any errors in judgement I might make). It is a photograph of a recent annular eclipse, as observed in Southern California (Spring 2012) via Flickr.

For this, a geometric approach is proposed in order to define the patterns of change of the market and a measure of multivariate kurtosis is used in order to test deviations from multinormality. The emergence of crises can be ...

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